A Blog About Stock Photography. John specializes in shooting stock photos including a mix of funny animal pictures with anthropomorphized pets (including dogs, cats, cows, elephants, monkeys and more), and concept stock photos for business and consumer communications. John's site includes interviews with photographers and leaders in the stock photo community as well as numerous articles on photography, digital imaging, and the stock photo business.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Long-tailed key words are the key to success in generating traffic to monetize stock photos on the Internet.

Searching The Internet For Images...and a Tidal Wave of Money

Every so often I spend a little time searching the net using phrases that ought to bring up one of my photos…a little research as to how things are going and if I can learn anything new. Just now I searched the phrase “Tidal Wave of Money” knowing that I have such an image and that it has been up on my site for a couple of months…long enough to probably have been indexed by Google and other search engines. This is a great example of a “long tailed key word”. Fewer people will be searching for that term, but the ones that are searching for it are more likely to license it when, and if, they find it.

The First Page of Web Search...and Imagekind.com

I was pleased to see my image on the first page of the web search (in position number eight). But I was surprised that it was a link to my image at Imagekind.com. Apparently it does pay to have images on Imagekind, not just for print fulfillment, but for gaining visibility on Internet searches as well! Perhaps it is because that Imagekind.com is such a larger entity and therefore carries more weight, that the image shows up earlier on the web search at Imagekind than the same image does on my own site…even though it has been up longer on my site.

Image Search...and More Money Images

Next I did the same phrase using an “image” search. This time the image showed up 14th on the first page, linked to my site. Two more of my other money images showed up later on the same page…both on the Imagekind.com site. By the way, I have started using the watermarking provided by Imagekind.com on the images I upload there…and with this kind of visibility I am glad I am doing that…though I wish their watermark was even larger!

Bing.com and Number One In Image Search

Next I did the same search at Bing.com. This time my web site came up number eight, but no sign of Imagekind.com. When I did an “Image” search my image came up number one at Bing...and again no sign of Imagekind.com. The same searches on Yahoo resulted in no trace of my image for the first five pages of web searches…but yet again number one under “Image” search.

Quality Content, Long Tailed Key Words and A Lot More Money!

What do I make of all this? Uh…keep plugging away. I am growing in confidence that with enough consistent work on getting quality content up on a site (and sites like Imagekind.com and CafePress.com) sooner or later (probably later) I will be generating the kind of revenue that I used to make in the heyday of stock photography. Actually, I plan on making a lot more (a tidal wave of money you might say…)! I am also more and more convinced that long-tailed key words, and lots of them, will be more important than ranking highly for single keywords. The only way to get huge traffic numbers with long tailed keywords is by having lots of well-key-worded content, which means you will have to excuse me…I have a lot of work to do!